This is the final post in a series on feeling responsible for the child abuse you endured. The series begins here .
Now the final truth — Children do not act and react like adults and should not be judged for not doing what an adult would have done.
In Janet’s comment, she said the following:
I even went along with what [my abuser] asked me. Doesn’t that make me worse than her? Aren’t I the one still hurting me now? ~ Janet
It is very easy in hindsight to play the “should have, would have, could have” game. From the perspective of safety and an adult body, it is easy to look back on your decisions as a child and judge yourself for not acting like an adult. While this is a very natural thing to do, it is extremely unfair to your wounded inner child.
My nine-year-old son does not think like I do in part because a child does not have the ability to think past this moment. As adults, we have many years of life under our belts, and we know that three months is not a very long period of time. As a child, summer vacation seemed to last F-O-R-E-V-E-R because three months out of a seven-year-old child’s life is a pretty sizable percentage whereas three months out of a forty-year-old person’s life really is not that long.
Until a child reaches the age of 18, he cannot sign a binding contract without a parent or guardian cosigning. Why? Because children simply do not think like adults do. They do not have the ability to think through the long-term consequences of their choices. My son would rather live on candy and popcorn than eat his vegetables because candy and popcorn taste better. At age nine, he does not appreciate that his body needs vitamins to grow big and strong. The pleasure of a better taste in the moment is all he sees: he cannot think through the short-term “sacrifice” of eating his broccoli to the long-term benefit of developing a healthier body. That is why he has a parent to make these decisions for him.
When your abuser hurt you, you were just a child. You believed in the existence of Santa Claus. (Think about that – You really believed that one person could deliver presents to every single home in the world in one night!) You were not a short adult. You were a child with very limited life experience.
I, too, had a very hard time with this. I hated the little girl I was and judged her so harshly. What really helped me was finding a picture of myself at the age that the abuse was happening (which was, unfortunately, during most of my childhood). I chose a picture of myself when I was two years old. I hated the child in that picture.
I forced myself to stop seeing that little girl as “me.” Instead, I imagined that this was another little girl that I was seeing for the first time. When I could separate myself from this little girl, it changed my perspective. I noticed how tiny her hands and feet were. I noted the boyish haircut and clothing that made her look more like a boy than a girl. When I was ready, I noticed the pain in this little girl’s eyes. Just about every picture of my son from age two has him grinning ear-to-ear, but this little girl looked like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. When I saw her as a separate little girl, she broke my heart.
As I felt a little compassion for the girl in the picture, I developed a little compassion for myself. I carried that picture around in my purse and looked at it often. Each time, I felt a little more love for her. I wanted to reach into the photograph, hold her in my arms, and give her love. She so desperately needed love. The more I grew to love that little girl, the more I embraced my inner child and learned how to love myself.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
7 years ago my therapist asked for some photos of my childhood. I had my mother mail her one from each year until the 8th grade.
I understood what she was going to do with them I thought. I though that she was going to start with the 8th grade and was prepared. She started with a photo of me as a baby. I snatched the photo out of her hand an tore it into pieces and threw it in the trash. I head “That is bad.” She said “that is sad”. When she asked why I did that I replied. “Seemed to be the thing to do at the time.
I am finding now that there is a huge Language thing with those before 3. Mean means sadistic abuser. Not good means horrible. That sort of thing.
There are many differences with how time and space are experienced when those from before 3 are working. They often blurt. It feels like a comment comes out of nowhere. The reality is they have thought long and hard about what they blurt.
Right now it is the job of the ancients. (all that were after age 3 and not before) to get us to see the gypsy dancer and back again. Staying out of the way as much as possible with out abandoning.
Well said Faith… and great points. It reminded me of something I read in a parenting mag a long time ago that hit me like a ton of bricks.
What I read was simple, yet as I was reading it I began bawling. It said that as infants we form our ideas about the world, our place in it, and who we are by the people around us. We simply soak in our environment and it becomes us in a way. (That isn’t what it said literally, Im paraphrasing) We are merely mirrors of what we receive when we are young and forming. So if we are around smiling loving people, we feel safe and loved and secure in ourselves, etc… when we are not, we are not, we are filled with fear and anxiety and scared of the world.
It would seem to reason, if we were looked upon by our caretaker/abusers with contempt and other inappropriate feelings, that we in turn would believe that about ourselves on such a core level… that is why child abuse is so hard when it comes to the mind/self concept stuff. The mixed messages and bad messages about ourselves are so hardwired, and our safety depended on it for so long, we actually have to rebuild from scratch who we are inside. It also may account for why we are so in tune with others and may over react to feeling slighted.
Anyway, I just wanted to share that.
peace,
mia
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Hey, Faith -
I’m right now dealing with coming to terms with the fact that what happened was a big deal. I have seen it as “no big deal” because that is what I was taught. Even now, as an adult, I have trouble seeing it as a big deal.
If I hear about it happening to someone else (a child in the present day, for example), I am furious. But, I am having trouble giving myself that gift. I feel very few emotions about all of it.
- Marie (Coming Out of the Trees)
Very good post, and very true. I am an educator and studying Social Work, and I can vouch fir this very fact. Children do not think like adults.
Even as adults, hindsight is 20/20. And we can never judge ourselves for what we could’ve should’ve done. Even if you were abused in adulthood, the fact is, you did the best you could in the moment to survive based on intuition and basic survival instincts. We can never accurately predict if we had done “this” how that would’ve changed things.
Be gentle with yourself because if you are here to talk about it, and you’re not blazingly psychotic, you survived and did so because you made the right choices in the moment to insure that survival.
Lothlorien
[...] abuse not a big deal, my abuse wasn’t that bad, minimizing abuse On my blog entry entitled Judging Your Childish Actions Through Adult Eyes, a reader posted the following comment: I’m right now dealing with coming to terms with the fact [...]